


Where I'll Be Hiding

by JerichoJaspersJeromeJr



Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: Angst, Canonical Character Death, M/M, Minor Violence, Pining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-11
Updated: 2017-02-11
Packaged: 2018-09-23 14:40:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,246
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9661784
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JerichoJaspersJeromeJr/pseuds/JerichoJaspersJeromeJr
Summary: Ravus loves Noctis from afar.(Trying to love him from up close has been nothing but a series of disasters.)





	

**Author's Note:**

> Another for the [kinkmeme](http://ffxv-kinkmeme.dreamwidth.org/841.html?thread=966217)

Ravus does not know how the fuck this happened to him.

He’s known Noctis forever, of course, but Noctis at 8-years-old, chubby-cheeked and wide-eyed, had been entirely harmless. 

Alright, okay, he’d been adorable but, still, harmless and Ravus had been 16 at the time and had better things to do than read fairytales to some kid.

About the only significant memory he even has of Noctis was one single golden afternoon, when his mother had needed Luna’s help with her duties and so Noctis had been dumped on Ravus to watch over. Since they couldn’t exactly spar or train together Ravus had taken him fishing instead and, yes, it had been fun, teaching Noctis how to bait a hook and cast a line, but it had been only been one afternoon. Ravus doubts Noctis even remembers it.

Most of the time, though, Noctis had been almost beneath his notice. Ravus had more important things to think about, like racing chocobos and his latest crush. 

Then Ravus’ childhood had ended as the groves of Fenestala Manor blazed.

Ravus’ family had risked everything for King Regis, only for him to abandoned them at the first sign of danger. Ravus was going to take everything from Regis in return, he was going to shatter his kingdom and end his line and piss on the remains.

That’s when Noctis stopped being just some injured little boy and became his enemy.

The problem was Ravus couldn’t get him to stay that way.

Ravus blames the King, really. Well, obviously he blames Regis for a lot of things but in this case specifically he blames him for hiding Noctis from the public eye so thoroughly, so that Ravus had had to resort to intelligence reports and blurry tabloid photos and hacked dial-up proxies piggy-backing into anonymous Lucian message boards to get any idea of the boy he regarded as his sworn rival. His destiny.

But the Noctis he grasped at in bits and pieces wasn't what Ravus needed him to be, he wasn’t the spoilt princeling who was going to deserve everything Ravus has planned for him. Instead, what he gets are reports of volunteering at animal shelters, of warm friendships and a life lived closer to his people than any Lucian Royal in generations.

“He addresses his Steward by first name, not by his title or even as Scientia,” he rants to his sister on one of the few occasions they can meet alone, “How the hell is he a Lucian Prince . . . Hah! I bet Regis’ wife cheated on him.”

“King Regis isn’t the evil ma . . . “ Luna looks at him, then pauses, “Wait, why are you spying on Noct like this, anyway?”

“Isn’t it obvious?” Ravus snarls, “don’t you want revenge too?”

And then Luna stared at him for a long, long moment and then got up and did some sort of complicated secret handshake with her dogs. That’s how Ravus first found out about the picture diary. Luna had spent the rest of the afternoon showing it to him, smiling so brightly over the little notes Noctis had written and the stickers he had picked out to send her.

Ravus’ anger had faltered in the face of his sister’s smile. How could he hate someone who could make his sister this happy?

After that, in the brief times they could steal together, she’d always make a point of sharing the diary with him. At first it was just a way to let Luna enjoy one of the few bright spots in her life but then one day he laughs at one of Noctis’ peculiarly laconic comments, written next to a picture of his Shield, and Luna looks up at him, eyes shining, and asks, “Why don’t you write something with me, this time?”

“What?” Ravus asks, heart suddenly pounding.

“Well, you were part of his childhood, too.” Luna says, “I’m sure he’d be happy to hear from you.”

“I . . . “ Ravus trails off and Luna’s eyes narrow at him, “ . . . Ravus, are you blushing?”

He is not going to fall in love with Noctis Lucis Caelum on the basis of his frankly awful handwriting and a dozen fuzzy long-range photographs. He is NOT.

He does so anyway.

When he and Luna couldn’t meet without being spied on, which was almost always, they wrote letters to each other instead. Not even the Chancellor’s best agents could intercept a messenger of the gods.

Holy messenger or not, though, Pryna was still a dog and even sacred dogs couldn’t read. That was how one day she delivered the wrong letter to Ravus. It’s only after he opens it that he realises the letter’s meant for someone else, someone named Prompto, and he double-checks to make sure that, yes, that was Luna’s handwriting.

He’s not enough of an arsehole to read the rest without permission so sends Pryna back to Luna with the letter and a note. Then he burns with curiosity for months until they can sneak a meeting again and he can finally, finally ask about it.

“Oh!”, Luna says when he asks, “Prompto! Yes, he’s another friend I write to.”

Then she smiles at him like it’s completely normal for Oracles under house-arrest to make friends with crown city commoners a continent away.

He gives her a look and she huffs and continues, “Pryna got hurt once while she was visiting Noctis. Prompto found her and looked after her until she was better so I wrote him to thank him and he wrote back and then I wrote back and then he wrote back and I suppose we just kept going?”

She gives him a little shrug but she looks so happy that he can’t bring himself to lecture her about the dangers. Luna has so few people she can talk to freely, Ravus knows he’s never there when Luna needs him and Gentiana’s overly prone to turning cryptic, and really what harm can some random boy do them?

He should have realised that after years of surviving in Imperial custody his little sister had had more than enough chances to master the fine art of subterfuge.

The consequences of his laxness don’t catch up with him until almost a year later. It starts harmlessly enough when Luna whips out an instant camera and points it at him. 

“It’s a gift from Prompto,” she explains brightly, “Smile!”

It was just a picture of him playing with Umbra, how was he to know how much trouble it would cause? If he had thought about it at all he’d have supposed that if it did fall into some Lucian strategist’s hands all they would do would be to immediately try to suppress it - can’t have the troops see the enemy general getting his chin licked by a happy dog, it’d be a _disaster_ for morale.

He should have been more paranoid, he really should have, but instead he sort of forgets about it and only really remembers the next time Luna shows him the diary.

“Wait, I thought you sent those pictures to Prompto?”

Luna gives him an innocent look, “Oh, he’s also friends with Noctis now, did I forget to mention that?”

“Wha . . . how . . . “ Ravus says intelligently. There’s now pictures of _him_ stuck in the diary, with comments in Noctis’ still-terrible handwriting written next to them. “Glad he looks happy” is next to the picture of him with Umbra. “He looks cool here” is by a picture of him standing in the training hall, sword at ready. Ravus isn’t even sure when Luna had a chance to take that one.

He turns the page and there’s another picture, one of the rare ones of Noctis himself. He’s holding up a freshly-caught fish and smiling and Ravus has a fleeting moment to feel happy that Noctis is still enjoying something Ravus taught him before he reads the writing next to it, “Show this to your brother if you want.”

Ravus almost has a heart attack.

His heart recovers, of course, in fact it goes soaring and it carries him for weeks afterwards. He wins several important political skirmishes at the Imperial Court and orchestrates a clever strategic victory against an uprising in Concordio. 

He’s letting the momentum carry him from triumph to triumph and it’s only when the Emperor is pinning a medal to his chest for winning a decisive battle against Galahdian rebels that he realises that he may accidentally be sending entirely the wrong sort of message to Noctis.

Noctis doesn’t mention him in the diary again.

After the mess in Insomnia he calls his sister on a burner phone. She’s got her own path and her own agenda and he’s not going to get in her way but he’s still her big brother and he wants to check in.

“I fucked this up, didn’t I?” he asks, once he’s settled that she’s still alive and breathing and not in immediate danger and she’s had a solid 15 minutes to yell at him over how he lost his arm.

“Yes.” she says, voice still angry.

“How badly?”

“Disastrously,” she says, but there’s sadness creeping into her voice now. She’s always been his biggest cheerleader.

“What if I . . . what if I keep hold of his father’s sword, so I can deliver it to him in person?”

He can’t see her rolling her eyes at him, not over the phone, but he knows she’s doing it anyway.

When he finally meets Noctis again it’s at Aracheole Stronghold with weapons drawn.

Noctis is so lovely in person, heart-breakingly so, those brilliant blue eyes now so sad but still so determined. An armed confrontation isn’t the way Ravus planned their reunion but he doesn’t have many options left.

Ravus has learnt a lot from Luna over the years. He knows no one’s told Noctis he’s the Chosen King of Light. He knows what Noctis doesn’t, that the gods have demanded him as sacrifice.

“You’ll never be King,” he snarls, when what he really means to say is, “Please, Let me take your place. _Please_.”

It’s almost a relief when the Chancellor intervenes and Noctis and his retenue get away without Ravus having to kill any of them. Almost, until the moment when Izunia looks at him with mock-pity and says, “You know, in my day we just sent flowers.”

Ravus doesn’t know what the Chancellor wants with Noctis, why Izunia would just let him escape. It’s another entry to add to the growing list of things keeping Ravus awake at night, along with Luna’s failing health, the Emperor’s growing madness and the unnatural strength in his new arm.

When he finally catches up with Luna in Altissa she looks even worse than he was prepared for, so pale she’s half a ghost already. He tries to hug her but she recoils from him, staring at the metal arm, then at his face.

When she slaps him he’s ready for it but it still stings like hell.

“What were you thinking!?” she screams at him, “You know what’s really in the magitek, how could you let that do them to you!?”

“I had to. The Emperor doesn’t want a broken puppet,” he says softly.

“But you _knew_ the Ring wouldn’t accept anyone but a Lucis Caelum,” she says, voice quieter now but still shaking with anger.

“I had . . . I needed to know that was true, that it really has to be Noctis,“ he smiles sadly at her, “Does it matter, aren’t we all making sacrifices these days?”

“It could have killed you, I could have lost you along with . . . with . . . ” she trails off and something in her eyes breaks. This time she hugs him back and he clings to her with his good arm as she sobs into his shoulder.

“I don’t know how much longer I can keep going,” she says, when they’re seated quietly together afterwards. Her hands twist nervously around the Ring, “It may not even matter. I can reach Leviathan, and Bahamut and Shiva will give their Blessings freely, but Ifrit won’t even grant me an audience. He won’t even listen to my _petition_ to grant me an audience.”

“We’ll figure it out,” he says, putting his good hand over hers, “I’ll make sure that the Empire doesn’t interfere with Leviathan’s Revelation, you won’t have to take on too much of a strain. Then after that I’ll find the Infernian and thrash him until he begs you for a Covenant.”

He smiles at her until she smiles back.

He wonders later what she must have thought of him while she was bleeding out. All those years, all his broken promises and pointless maneuvering, how none of it ever amounted to anything worthwhile. In the end, he had just failed her again.

He has a lot of time to think about that, now that he’s awaiting execution in a cell in Zegnautus Keep.

In the aftermath of Altissia it had been his word against the Chancellor’s. It was a contest Ravus could never have won to begin with; Ardyn Izunia was the Emperor’s lucky charm, the man who had won him the war, and Ravus was just a rebel finally revealing his true colours. But what haunts Ravus most was how the Imperial Court had laughed at him as he presented his defense.

According to Loqi, Izunia had been by the Emperor’s side the entire time.

Ravus tries to put the pieces together rationally instead of just giving-in to the growing terror that’s clawing at him from inside. He’s of the Oracle’s Line and yet he’s horrifically out of his depth here, he can’t even imagine how unprepared Noctis must be. 

Ravus isn’t sure if even the Gods are ready for what’s coming.

He starts awake from a fitful sleep to find the cells around him silent and empty and the corridor dark. When he leans against the bars to try and see what’s going on the cell door swings open at his touch.

The hallways are eerily quiet, his only company the magitek troopers lying crumpled and still on the floor. The only sign of anyone else he finds is an empty uniform at the guard station, slumped over the desk in the shape of a person.

He says a prayer over it to any god that might still care, then steals its pass-card.

Ravus weighs the merits of stealth against speed and decides a quick escape is worth the risk. He is the son and brother of Oracles, he knows what a Starscrounge outbreak looks like. If anyone tries to block his way, anyone still human at least, he doubts it’ll take long to convince them to lay down arms and escape with him.

The Central Atrium, when he reaches it, is completely empty except for two familiar swords, stuck together in the floor to crisscross against each other. His sword. King Regis’ sword.

He approaches them cautiously and tries to pull them out as quietly as he can. The floor plates are hardened steel, though, and don’t cooperate. The shriek of metal echos through the vast shaft.

He takes Regis’ sword first, even though he can’t wield it and this is not the time to leave himself unarmed, because bringing it safely to Noctis is a promise that means more than his life right now. Miraculously nothing attacks him before he has time to retrieve his own sword but the tension leaves him on edge.

The sound of footsteps behind him has him whirling around, sword drawn.

Ardyn Izunia is standing on the bridge that leads to the airship hangers, smiling pleasantly at him. Ravus stays in a fighting crouch, “You! What the hell are trying to do?”

“Now, now, General,” the Chancellor chides, “I only let you out because I thought little Noct may need you. You’re not going to be much help to him if you’re too scared to think straight.”

The way Izunia says Noctis' name makes Ravus’ skin crawl. “What do you want with Noctis?” he snarls.

Izunia tilts his head, smile twisting, “Why, nothing more than what your sister wanted for him - to see him ascend to his rightful place as the Chosen King. Surely you’re enough of a brother to at least honour her last wishes?”

Ravus’ body moves before he’s even aware of it. Izunia goes down with a single blow, cleaved almost in two, and Ravus spits on the corpse.

He steps around Izunia’s body and makes his way towards the hangar - an airship isn’t a bad idea, he thinks - and then he hears quiet footsteps behind him again.

He keeps walking, letting them draw close before he whirls sharply around, sword slicing upwards.

Izunia catches his sword with his bare hand.

Ravus struggles. He struggles to catch his breath, he struggles to pull the sword free. Izunia just smiles at him, “Really now, none of this fuss is necessary.”

The Chancellor lifts up the edge of his coat with his free hand and makes a show of examining the gob of spit slowly sliding down the surface. Then he tilts his head back at Ravus and sighs, “Though there are some things I can’t overlook, I’m afraid.”

All of Ravus’ senses are screaming at him to let go off his sword and _run_ but he’s spent years in battle learning to ignore them and push through.

Then Izunia’s face goes wrong, black oozing out of his skin, eyes turning gold and feral, and Ravus realises he should have listened to his instincts.

He’s letting go off his sword and turning to escape and then there’s a moment of disorientation, his foot finding nothing under it, before he realises that Izuna’s just thrown him off the bridge.

Consciousness comes back slowly, first with the sensations of ‘hot’ and ‘red’. Then ‘green’ and ‘sharp’. There’s a familiar tingle of healing magic underlying it all but not the sort of gentle golden warmth he’s used to. He groans and opens his eyes and then hears someone whisper hoarsely, “Oh thank the Six.”

He raises his head to see Noctis kneeling over him. The Prince’s clothes are torn and filthy and there’s a streak of dried blood across his cheek but the relief in Noctis’ eyes is the sweetest thing Ravus has ever seen.

“You look like shit,” Ravus says, then winces at himself.

“So do you,” Noctis says, smiling faintly as he helps Ravus stand. 

Ravus futilely tries to dust himself off and then looks up in surprise when Noctis hands him his sword. Noctis shrugs, “I found it with you.”

“ . . . Thank you,” Ravus says. There’s so much more he wants to say but the words won’t come.

“That’s for me to say,” Noctis says, and when Ravus looks at him Noctis is very clearly blushing, “Thanks. For bringing me my dad’s sword, I mean.”

“How . . . how did you?” Ravus stammers, then that’s when he sees them.

There are white sheets of paper scattered all around them. It takes him a moment to process what they are; they’re his letters, they’re his godsdamned letters and somehow Ravus knows Ardyn Izunia’s behind this. 

Ravus is pretty sure he’s never written to his sister about Noctis’ arse, but his hair and eyes had certainly been fair game.

“I, uh, didn’t really read them,” Noctis says, blushing harder, “Much.”

Ravus’ track-record of trying to reach out to Noctis has been nothing but a series of disasters so far.

So it’s a good thing it’s Noctis who initiates the kiss.

**Author's Note:**

> 1) Please feel free to imagine they're going to figure this out somehow and it'll all end in rainbows and laughter. OR you can join me in thinking it'll go pretty much as it did in canon because the mental image of these two dorks sitting together in the afterlife throne-room, snogging and gazing adoringly at pictures of fish, is too good to pass up.
> 
> 2) I'm sorry, Luna. One day I will get around to writing you some Lunyx to make up for it.


End file.
